“Are you staying here because your father’s home is too gloomy to endure, or because you can’t give up the pleasure of gloating over my misery?” Incomprehensible woman! When he tried to insult her, she always parried or stepped aside and came home with a thrust of perfect confusion for him. And now that he had hurled at her the dirtiest missile of contempt within his reach, instead of crying out in rage, marching off in hurt pride, or throwing something at him, she laughed aloud and flung herself across his lap and hugged his neck with bare, warm arms till he choked. “You are the stupidest darling alive. But every now and then, when you get horribly superior or hideously downcast you say the wisest things! Why is it that you understand me only when you are mad at me?” He put lonely, hunting hands about her lithe, stayless waist, and smothered his face among the white hawthorn buds in the snowy lane of her bosom. Men were still calling women “mysterious” because women’s interests were different from men’s. The males, like stupid hounds, found cats occult simply because they said “mew!” instead of “wow!” Patty completely puzzled her husband when she chuckled: “You are a beast, and an imbecile, and my father hates you and blames me for bringing you into our family, so I’ll have to be a mother to you.” He winced at being cherished as an idiot child, but anything was better than exile from that fragrant presence, and he clung to her with desperation. CHAPTER IX Now that love had bridged another of the abysses that kept opening in the solid ground of their union, they fell a prey to curiosity. They decided simultaneously to go visit the scene of the ruins. The streets were a-crawl with men, women, and children hurrying to the crater of the volcano. Many of the hasteners were persons who had slept through the night and set out to open their shops at the usual hour, only to find them fuming heaps of refuse. People who dwelt as far out as Bleecker or Houston Street had been generally unaware of the disaster. Some of the late arrivals were still able to drag from their cellars, or from the jumbled streets in front of them, a certain portion of their stocks. A coffee merchant salvaged cartloads of well-roasted bean; a dealer in chewing tobacco shoveled up wagonloads of dried weed and sold it later; drygoods men rescued scorched bolts of calico and worsted to furnish forth bankrupt sales. Patty wailed aloud to see heaps of fine lace blackening on the ground and bolts of silk still blazing. One china shop was melted into ludicrous clusters, as of grapes from a devil’s vineyard. Zinc and copper roofs had formed cascades that were hardened as if a god had petrified a flood.